


Ba Sing Se Orphan

by ozymandias314



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Accidental Baby Acquisition, F/F, Kid Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-28
Updated: 2014-02-28
Packaged: 2018-01-14 01:40:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,075
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1247992
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ozymandias314/pseuds/ozymandias314
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"You know," Mai said after a while, "we can't keep him. It's one thing in a boat. As long as we keep him quiet, everyone will just think we're spending too much time fucking. But at home we have servants. They're gossipy, they make trouble, they blackmail you... We'll never be able to keep him secret forever."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ba Sing Se Orphan

What if, as a thought experiment, I had done something that would make Azula really mad at me? Like, hypothetically, I said I'd smuggled an Earth Kingdom war orphan onto the boat with me and now he's crying and I had to chi-block him to make him stop so Azula didn't know and I don't know if chi-blocking is bad for babies and I think he's hungry because he hasn't eaten in a day and what do you even feed a baby?" 

By the end of her soliloquy, Ty Lee was approaching hysterics. It wasn't a good look on her; Mai liked her much better when she was cheerful. She obviously hadn't slept in two days. Her hair was sticking up in four different directions. In short, Mai's girlfriend was in distress. And, Mai supposed, it was her job as the knight in shining armor to fix everything. 

Mai began her knight in shining armor career by saying, "I would say you're stupid."

Oh well. Mai was out of practice in the hero business.  

Ty Lee, however, seemed to take that answer as comfort. "You wouldn't like-- tell Azula or anything, right?"

"No."

"Oh good," Ty Lee said. "In other news, you'll never guess what I have in my stateroom!"

"...A hungry Earth Kingdom war orphan you don't know how to feed?"

"It was really sad-looking?"

Mai allowed her silence to speak for itself.

"I watched the Dai Li stab its parents and-- it was going to die and I couldn't let it die, Mai, not a baby, not one that didn't do anything!"

"There were lots of dead babies in Ba Sing Se," Mai said. "I don't see why we should care about this one more than the ones whose parents didn't happen to be killed in front of you."

"Mai." Mai wasn't looking at Ty Lee, but she could just tell her arms were crossed.

"If you were really concerned about dead babies, you shouldn't have invaded Ba Sing Se in the first place," Mai said. "Now, leave me alone to take my nap."

\---

Ty Lee normally prided herself on not being an anxious person. No matter what life threw at her, she maintained her cheerful, happy disposition and brought joy into the lives of everyone who knew her. 

Apparently, however, 'whatever life threw at her' did not include 'babies.' 

Ty Lee paced. Ideally, she'd do some backflips and splits to get out the nervous energy, but her cabin was only a few feet long. She could barely even pace. There was nothing to do but drum her fingers on her legs, finger the torn bit of her dress, and fret. 

"Are you sure hippo-cow milk is good for babies?"

"I'm sure that starvation is not," Mai said. Cradling the baby on one arm, Mai dipped the rag that once was Ty Lee's skirt in milk and placed it between the baby's lips. He sucked eagerly. 

"Shouldn't we get like... breast milk or something?"

"If you can figure out how to get breast milk on a boat," Mai said, "without telling anyone you have a war orphan, then you can go right ahead and get it."

"Azula's going to find out and then she's going to kill me," Ty Lee moaned. 

"No, she won't," Mai said. "If you are dead, then you will stop having sex with me, and finding an equally cute, charming, and violent girl sounds much harder than hiding a baby for a week."

Ty Lee whirled and glared at Mai. "Don't talk about sex in front of the baby!"  

"The baby can't understand what we're saying." Mai dipped the rag in milk again and presented it to the baby's lips. A little dribbled on the baby's chest; Ty Lee hurried over to wipe it off. 

"Of course," Mai added, gently stroking the baby's hair, "you could always throw it overboard, and then we wouldn't have to worry about Azula murdering us *and* we could talk about sex as much as we wanted."

The nervous energy inside Ty Lee doubled. Mai wasn't-- serious, was she? They had all killed dozens if not hundreds of people, Azula at least had no problems with killing a baby, Mai...Mai might too. 

Mai continued, "We could even have sex."

"If you throw the baby overboard," Ty Lee said, trying to play it off as a joke, "you are never going to get to have sex with me again."

"Unreasonable." Mai returned to rocking the baby, singing under her breath a song her mother had sang to her. Ty Lee watched with vague relief. It looked like Mai wasn't going to kill him. 

"You know," Mai said after a while, "we can't keep him. It's one thing in a boat. As long as we keep him quiet, everyone will just think we're spending too much time fucking. But at home we have servants. They're gossipy, they make trouble, they blackmail you... We'll never be able to keep him secret forever."

Ty Lee felt a moment of sudden, irrational relief that Mai was talking about keeping him. "I know," Ty Lee said. "But there are orphanages and things in the Capital, right? Sympathetic families who'd be glad to take in a kid and not ask too many questions about where it came from, in exchange for the right amount of cash?" 

"Orphanages aren't good places. Especially for a kid who's obviously not Fire Nation."

"They're better than Ba Sing Se." 

"Have you thought about how you're going to pay for it?" Mai was so... infuriatingly reasonable that Ty Lee wanted to strangle her. How could she talk like that when it was a baby's life on the line? 

"I don't know," Ty Lee said. "Pretend I took up an expensive drug habit or something. Mai-- you understand why I couldn't leave him be, right?" Her voice was desperate. 

Mai's answer was quiet, spoken as much to the baby as to Ty Lee. "I do." 

\--

 

Babies, Mai concluded, required a truly absurd number of rags.

They fed him with a rag, which (Mai guessed) women who could breastfeed didn't need to worry about. He slept in a corner, tucked under a rag, with a pile of rags between him and the floor. He was swaddled in rags. He wore rags as diapers. And of course they couldn't wash the diapers, so they needed a new one every time he pooped, which he did a lot. Babies seemed to be infinite machines for turning milk into poo. Mai was starting to run out of clothes, and she wasn't sure how she was going to be able to replace them. Or explain to Azula why she was suddenly wearing the same outfit all the time. 

Worse, Mai was starting to like the little kid. Mai had always known she was going to have to have kids: she was supposed to marry-- if not Zuko then another noble-- and have little heirs for the Fire Nation. However, it was a comfort that Mai didn't necessarily have to have anything to do with the little brats. She could leave them to be raised by nurses. Mai had zero maternal instinct, and she liked him that way.   

But she liked the little Earth Kingdom kid. 

\--

Ty Lee gently rocked the child. 

"What are you singing?" Mai asked.

"...Girls From Ba Sing Se?"

"Isn't that the one with--"

"Yes."

"Oh, yes, me talking about sex in front of the baby is going to corrupt it."

\--

Ty Lee was unaccountably nervous when she brought up the topic to Mai. When she finally decided to say it, she was rocking the baby, so she had an excuse to stare into his dark-brown eyes rather than Mai's cold face.

"We should name him." 

Mai's reaction was predictable. "No."

"We can't just call him 'the baby' all the time," Ty Lee said, her stomach sick. "It's not right."

"You're getting attached," Mai said flatly. 

Ty Lee didn't answer, instead gently rocking the baby back and forth. He gurgled. 

"You are," Mai said. "Ty Lee, no. We agreed we'd give him up to an orphanage."

"Shh," Ty Lee said, stroking the baby's hair. "Shh. It's going to be okay." 

Mai sighed. "What name were you thinking of?"

"Jet," Ty Lee said. "It's a good name for a boy. And just look at the color of his hair!" 

"Jet." Mai looked at the baby. "Well, it suits him." 

 

\--

Mai liked taking the baby out for walks at night.

The sailors were scared of her because she was cold, noble, and really into pointy things. They whispered that she was a witch. Mai didn't really care: it allowed her to go for walks at night without them listening. It was probably good for Jet to go outside, breathe the night air, not be cooped up in the cabin all day. 

She sang to Jet, as she walked. Snatches of songs-- popular tunes, classic songs they'd learned in class, long-forgotten bits of songs her nurses had sung to her when she was small. She recited the poetry they'd had to memorize in school and added a little tune to it: Mai was never much of a songwriter, but Jet seemed to appreciate it. He smiled, instead of crying. 

Most of the time, though, she just walked, or stood and stared out into the night. The sea moved smoothly, pushed by the wind and the current, not by a waterbender; it was peaceful, rhythmic, orderly. Mai got the sense that if you watched it long enough you could figure out the rules, figure out why one wave went this way rather than that; and then every time you wanted to know about waves in the future, you could just apply the rules and find out. She liked that, about waves. They were much simpler than people. 

Mai was used to Ty Lee's chi-bending-- they'd been friends and lovers long enough-- but she never got over how creepy it was when Jet cried in utter silence. 

\--

Azula's cheerful voice came from outside Ty Lee's cabin. "So, when are you going to let me meet your war orphan?" 

Ty Lee got into fighting stance and cleared her mind of how hopeless the battle would be. She would simply have to win; that was all. She had to protect Jet. Across the room, Mai froze, the incriminating baby in her arms.

"You two must think I'm an idiot," Azula said as she entered the room. Her grin was enormous. "Suddenly spending all your time together, consuming truly absurd amounts of hippo-cow milk, vomit on your clothes... either you have a baby or some truly interesting fetishes, and I already know all of your fetishes." She smiled suddenly. "So, can I hold him?" 

Ty Lee didn't slip out of her stance. Mai readied her knives. 

"Oh, I see," Azula said, taking in the scene. "You must think I'm going to kill him! I don't know why you two would think such a terrible thing about me, when I have never been anything but kind and generous to you."

"Well, you did murder lots of Earth Kingdom babies," Mai pointed out.

"Oh, that's business," Azula said with an airy wave of her hand. "I would never murder a baby that belonged to my friends. Particularly not when we can claim he's the new heir to the throne of Ba Sing Se and gain legitimacy in our rule. That was your plan, right?"

Azula was giving them an out. Praise to all the spirits, for whatever inscrutable reason of her own, Azula was giving them an out. She had to know that Ty Lee had meant nothing of the sort and Mai had helped her... But it wasn't, Ty Lee realized as if it were a dream, in Azula's interests for them to be dead. She needed them, at least for now. She wanted to have something to hold over them, to assure their loyalty.  

Across the room, Mai relaxed fractionally. 

"See, it's very silly," Azula said. "Hiding your plans from me like that, as if I disapprove of initiative on the part of my lieutenants." Azula's cheerful smile turned vicious. "It was initiative, wasn't it? You weren't starting to feel for those Earth Kingdom imbeciles, were you? Starting to think that the Fire Nation is perhaps a teensy-weensy bit unfair?"

"Nope," Mai said. 

"Never," Ty Lee added.

"Very good," Azula said. "So, can I hold him?" 


End file.
